nickalaso

And this post has been flagged too, presumably by some group that is sharing the link internally, targeting the spread of this information as if it was a threat to them.

There has to be some sociological phenomenon that explains these kinds of events, and the strange group-think hivemind warfare type behavior that is now commonplace on all social media, across the entire political spectrum.

Does anyone have reading recommendations? This kind of thing fascinates me.

Being a little bit pedantic here, but isn't all evidence, for something that can't be proven mathematically or definitionally, circumstantial?

Many users ARE stupid and lazy, though certainly not all.

But when you create a platform that incentives lazy dumb behavior from both your consumers and your content creators, you end up having a platform with mostly lazy dumb content that mostly only appeals to lazy dumb users, which then creates a feedback loop.

Twitter is a prime example of this. The limited tweet length, and the nature of their algorithm incentivizes the "content-creators" on the platform, I.E. the top 1% of users with a significant follower base, to tweet quick, low information, "hot takes" that mostly appeal to dumb partisanship. Also, the way "engagement", I.E. "views" works, incentivizes "zinger" style shit-slinging rather than actual discussion.

This ends up driving away people looking for interesting discussions, opinions, or information, reducing the "market" on that platform for a content-creator who wants to create informed or interesting content.

This feedback loop cycles over and over, until eventually, a platform that might have once provided interesting content ends up being a place that only provides the lowest brow kind of echo chamber drivel.

And this is how Twitter has ended up being a place where the most popular voices are on either side of a binary partisan line, either celebrating the ambush and shooting of two police officers or pushing the idea that anyone with even the slightest past criminal history has no human rights and deserves to be shot by the police.

There have been rumors it was Venus related on twitter for a few days now.

Journalists got the release early and several of them tweeted out hints.

But I guess we will find out for sure on the 14th.

I live in a studio apartment with high rent, with a half mile walk from my office. I did this on purpose so I wouldn’t have to commute. Now I am spending high rent for a small space. My company keeps stating that we will have to return to the office in some unknown “near future”, otherwise I would plan on going full WFH and relocating to a larger home somewhere cheaper and more rural. But I’m stuck.

I also miss my dedicated workspace, and I miss being able to separate work and home life easily by going no contact after 5PM without management thinking that means I am a bad employee.

But most of all, I miss being able to let my bosses "micromanage" me in a way that didn't disrupt me. “Office Politics” has changed at my company in a way that is taking up a lot more of my productive time than it used to, and I hate it.

Before the Great WFH of 2020, my boss would walk by my cubicle or speak to me in person regularly. Short conversations, didn't ever bother me, and allowed me to focus on work. Made him feel busy and made him feel I was busy. Ultimately I was able to spend less time "appearing busy" and more on actually getting work done.

Since management at my company doesn't know how to actually track real work output, they have always used proxies like "how long does this person stay at the office?", "Are they still in their cubicle when I am leaving?", "When I walk by their cubicle do they have their IDE open doing 'coding stuff'" etc. etc.

I’ve always been decently performant at code production. So all I had to do was stay on my coding tasks for a few hours each day, have an IDE always open on at least one of my monitors and wait til exactly 5:01 PM every day before I left as that was when my boss went home. I ended up getting stuff done quick, got to avoid most meetings, and could screw around the rest of the day if I wanted. Personal projects, internet surfing, etc.

Great reviews from management. I would prefer an actual meritocratic standard based on actual work done, but that really has never been the case at any of the companies I have ever worked at so far in my career as a software engineer, so I’m used to it at this point.

But now that we are all WFH, they really don't seem to know what to do. They don't know how much work anyone is, or isn't doing, instead daily standups have changed from 10 minute short succinct updates to “how aggressively and for how long can you technobabble bullshit about your coding tasks you did yesterday” turning these stand ups into at least an hour or more, and now I have to also technobabble bullshit or management will think I’m slacking.

Even more so than before, they now seem to think pointless emails and multi-hour zoom meetings are the true marker of productivity. I hate this. I don't want to have to spend hours per day making up bullshit technobabble emails and sitting in on multi-hour long zoom meetings talking about unrelated boring bullshit. I just want to be able to focus on getting my coding tasks done for the day. Some of the lowest performers on my team love it though, because they are great at meetings, scheduling meetings, and making themselves feel important with pointless technical presentations during these meetings. Not to mention we are expected to have our webcams on at all times during these meetings, so I can’t even “pretend” to be present while I go make myself tea or something.

The barrier to entry for meetings has lowered. Before, scheduling a meeting in the office room down the hall and giving a presentation on why we all should add “bureaucratic coding standard addition xyz” was both too scary and too much work. Now, its “why not, management will think I am showing leadership skills!”.

Thanks guys, I love more poorly managed bureaucracy. Test driven development might be good if someone actually managed it and maintained standard during code reviews, but now everyone just creates shitty unit tests to meet the 70% code coverage requirement we are told to meet because the literal lowest performer on my team scheduled multi hour meetings with management on why we should all follow tde and convinced them it was a good idea.

You still would amass capital. Guns, food, persons, other resources.

The destruction of fiat currency wouldn't prevent the accumulation of valuable goods/commodities.

Which has been the case since almost the inception of the country, as it is a direct consequence of the First-past-the-post voting system that the US government has implemented.

No offense, but I personally hate it when someone online mentions the existence of scientific research supporting their position, and then doesn't post a link to said research.

I'm personally interested in reading the papers you mentioned, could I get the link(s)?

I've always felt that conspiracy theorists provide a certain value to the internet. They are almost the vaccine itself to misinformation. The foreign pathogen that teaches the body to defend itself from a worse foe.

If you can't understand, and also form a series of arguments for yourself, as to why the tin foil hat conspiracy theorist is wrong, why the earth almost certainly isn’t flat, or run by a cabal of shapeshifting alien lizard people, 5G, etc. how are you going to respond to the more insidiously cogent arguments about other more important things that are just as wrong but harder to spot?

I personally credit my upbringing by my religious parents into creationism (the concept that the earth is only 6 thousand years old and evolutionary science is a conspiracy against God.) as what ultimately led to my development of critical thinking and healthy skepticism, as I dug myself out of that belief system and deconverted in my late teens.

I remember feeling so deeply and irradeemably stupid, for being so completely convinced without any reason or evidence. And then, as a result, feeling so desperate for a specific formula or system of thought that could let me avoid this kind of personal failing in the future.

Which led me to listening to debates, learning about things like burden of proof, and the preponderance of evidence. And the very simple and straightforward concept of spot checking whether a stated “truth” used by someone in an argument is actually valid, or if they are lying to bolster their points, expecting (correctly, unfortunately) that the vast majority of their audience will never even check to see if they are telling the truth or a lie.

How else are you going to teach someone to think critically without showing them the examples of what a bad argument is, and how to respond to it rationally? Tell them to just trust the “good” sources? That’s arguably worse than telling them nothing at all.

It certainly is largely the fault of our garbage public schooling system, but the existing penchant to call for the banning and censcoring of stupid conspiracies online as if it were some sort of panacea for stupidity itself is certainly not helping the problem.

We can and should fight back, this makes the job of the surveillance state harder. But my concern is, that I think the problem will eventually get much worse than it is today.

I believe that eventually this kind of surveillance will be run almost entirely by sophisticated Artificial Intelligence. It partially is already, but as the technology improves, the amount and quality of the automated surveillance will increase.

Masks, lasers, cones, they might be quite effective against current technology, but that is going to change as the technology improves and an AI can determine your identity from your gait, or a combination of other features such as the width of your shoulders, the length of various bones in your body, etc. China is almost certainly already working on this kind of software as a direct response to the Hong Kong protests.

Governments will continue to work towards innovating and improving their surveillance programs, specifically in a way that reduces the amount of actual humans that are involved (to reduce the probability of another like Snowden) as well as reduce the visibility of the program to not trigger and go against human's "desire to be free" the article mentions.

The response to the coronavirus has been many orders of magnitude more strict than the response to the flu. All this while be less than an order of magnitude as deadly, probably 3X-4X. This is why I think it is perfectly valid to compare it to the flu.

The collective response has been outsized to the actual risk of death, and I believe this is due to fear rather than sensible policymaking.

If it really was about reducing all cause mortality, most governments could do so much to reduce the primary causes of death, like heart disease and cancer, by banning things like cigarettes and enforcing healthier diets among the populace.

Imagine what banning sugar alone would do to the rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes in the US. But no one wants to do that.

Misinformation is different from censorship.

I would personally rather have to sort through misinfo myself, rather than run the risk of having truthful information hidden from me.

The problem on Reddit is the problem of all social media. HN is better simply because it is too small to be targeted by the bigger more well funded PR campaigns.

Also, it probably helps that this community is not particularly demographically diverse compared to the average. There is less value to a PR company in sockpuppeting here, unless they are specifically trying to reach tech workers specifically.

So to follow your argument to its logical conclusion.

Are you fine with dying today?

We want to live when life is good, because life is good. If you are enjoying your life today, and want to keep living because of it, then you are going to want to keep living when you are in your 70's.

But you don't worry about it now, because you are young.